The use and abuse of history: slavery and its contemporary legacies

Beyond Trafficking and Slavery editors introduce their issue 'On History', which challenges the superficial narratives of anti-slavery used by 'modern-day abolitionists' and considers the lessons found in alternative historical approaches.

Daniel Day-Lewis in Steven Spielberg’s (2012) ‘Lincoln’. Fair use.

Campaigners
and governments leading the fight to end ‘modern-day slavery’ regularly appeal
to the history of anti-slavery to help justify their current activities and
agendas. These appeals to history typically involve one or more of the
following: 1) a selective focus upon mostly
white anti-slavery campaigners in Britain and the United States; 2) a largely uncritical
celebration
of the virtues of ‘great emancipators’, such as William Wilberforce and Abraham
Lincoln, whose personal examples are invoked as models to emulate; and 3) a recurring
emphasis on innovative
strategies used by ordinary citizens—petitions, boycotts, pamphlets—whose impact
is held to have been politically decisive in securing ‘freedom’ for enslaved
Africans.

Anti-slavery
campaigners are therefore chiefly regarded as “heroes [who] won great battles”,
to quote Kevin Bales, and their
inspirational historical example is put forward as a model that we should follow
today. In a high profile speech in 2012, US President Obama declared that “Our fight
against human trafficking is one of the greatest human rights causes of our
time, and the United States will continue to lead it—in partnership with
you. The change we seek will not come
easy, but we can draw strength from the movements of the past.” If pioneers
such as Wilberforce and Lincoln were able to end legal slavery, then what stops
a new band of college students, churches, activists and public officials from
‘liberating slaves’ today?

This
superficial approach to history is flawed. It sings songs of praise for past anti-slavery
efforts, yet does not seriously engage with the history of slavery or its
legacies. Centuries of severe and systematic exploitation and abuse have too
often been reduced to an abbreviated form of ‘pre-history’, whose main
narrative function is to set the stage for the ‘moral triumph’ of abolition. As
a number of our contributors demonstrate in more depth, millions of enslaved
Africans played a fundamental role in both building the Americas and enriching
Europe, while external demand for slaves drew parts of Africa into a political
economy of violent enslavement.

Prior to the early
nineteenth century, forced migration from Africa to the Americas greatly
outpaced migration from Europe. Enslaved labour not only constituted a key
source of wealth and power, it also proved to be a core economic motor for the
development of modern
capitalism.
To protect and maintain this system, slave owners and their allies developed
elaborate institutions to both regulate and reinforce their property rights, including
new forms of banking, contract, insurance and policing. They also devised self-serving
racist theories to justify their privileges. This toxic combination of racism
and economic interest created a system of slavery chiefly defined by
extraordinary levels of physical abuse, psychological torment, and sexual
violence.

Enslaved
Africans both resisted and endured these inhuman conditions. Resistance could
take many different forms, with some of the most notable examples including
shipboard uprisings crossing the Atlantic and numerous cases of flight and
revolt upon arrival in the Americas. Slaves who escaped joined Maroon
communities outside European control, such as Palmares in the seventeenth
century, or travelled long distances to settle in ‘free’ communities such as Boston and Buxton in the nineteenth. Families and communities also emerged
under the shadow of slavery. Slaves found ways to establish personal bonds,
however fragile, and contributed to the evolution of distinctive forms of
language, food, music, religion and culture.

Historical
patterns of resistance were fundamental to the anti-slavery cause, yet too many
‘modern-day
abolitionists’ continue to imagine slaves as passive victims who benefitted
from activism conducted by others on their behalf. This overlooks the crucial
role of slaves and ex-slaves in challenging historical slave systems. This most
famous example is the successful revolt of 1791 that paved the way for the foundation
of the Black Republic
of Haiti
in 1804. Black generals such as Toussaint L'Ouverture and
Jean-Jacques Dessalines won a series of decisive victories
against English, French and Spanish armies, and thereby created an inescapable
challenge to racist ideologies that held that blacks were inherently inferior
to whites.

When states in
Latin America broke away from Spain during the early nineteenth century, slaves fought
for their freedom in wars of independence. Decades later, as many as 100,000 slaves
and ex-slaves fought against the Confederacy during the Civil War in the United
States. According to a new body of research by historians such as Steven Hahn, the enlistment of slaves
in the Union army can be best understood as part of a much larger slave
rebellion, which saw slaves in the southern United
States massively undermine slavery through their own efforts.

Neither the legal
abolition of slavery nor the official end of hostilities brought
resistance to an end. Whenever slavery was abolished, former slave owners and entrenched
elites made every effort to defend their privileges, thereby forcing former
slaves to continue their
struggle for rights and recognition. In the decades that followed legal
abolition, former slave owners turned to other similar systems of labour
exploitation, such as indentured, forced and convict labour. They also
concocted new systems of racial dominance, such as the ‘separate yet equal’ duplicity
of the Jim Crow era, which was in
turn policed by the horrors of
lynching.

Extreme
violence was often justified as ‘protecting’ white feminine virtue from the
‘uncontrollable’ sexual savagery of black men, while female black domestic workers
continued to labour in white households under conditions often reminiscent of
slavery. When Britain and France abolished slavery in 1834 and 1848, respectively,
both governments financially compensated
masters
for the loss of their property. In no
case did slaves receive compensation for their years of toil and abuse. These
and other related developments ultimately contributed to global patterns of
wealth, poverty, inequality and discrimination that remain with us to this day.

Introducing our Contributors

Over the next three
weeks we will publish a series of articles that explore these and other related
historical themes in greater depth. All of these articles were specifically
commissioned to explore issues and developments that have been overlooked or marginalised
in the rush to celebrate the virtues of ‘great emancipators’. As we shall see,
there is a great deal that the global history of slavery and anti-slavery can potentially
teach us about how our world is organised today, while also suggesting possible
futures and political projects that could—and should—emerge in relation to
combating contemporary injustice, discrimination and exploitation.

It should become
apparent, moreover, that the global history of slavery and anti-slavery is much
more than a useful source of instruction and inspiration regarding how we
should act today. This history also speaks directly to the too often neglected
question of how we should not act. Whenever the
legal abolition of slavery is reduced to the ‘moral triumph’ of ‘heroic’
campaigners, little space remains for more challenging questions and political
consequential questions regarding the practical limitations of what was accomplished,
what happened next, and what other factors and actors were also in play.

We begin with a
series of articles focusing upon government responsibility. Every government in
the world today is officially committed to the anti-slavery cause, yet this
rhetoric conflicts with official support for legal regimes and policy responses that
promote forms of systemic abuse, vulnerability, discrimination and
exploitation. This is not a new phenomenon, as histories of the Communist gulag,
Nazi work camps and colonial forced labour regimes have helped make clear. In
our lead article published today, Jim Stewart explores how US government
officials were not only directly responsible for upholding legal slavery and slave
trading, they also occupied a similar role in the aftermath of legal abolition
in 1865, with both federal and state level officials playing a decisive role in
defending ‘slavery by another name’. Stewart
argues that this history has far-reaching ramifications for the present, but it
has been largely overlooked owing to the failure of ‘modern-day abolitionists’ to
grapple with slavery and race.

Our first week on government responsibility also features
contributions from Alex Lichtenstein, Genevieve LeBaron, Laya
Behbahani, Benedetta Rossi and Sara Farris. Both Lichtenstein and LeBaron concentrate
upon the historical roots and contemporary dimensions of the US ‘prison
industrial complex’. Each author offers a different yet complimentary analysis
of the underlying interests of governments and their private sector allies in perpetuating and profiting from prison labour. Behbahani
considers the historical origin and more recent evolution of the kafala system, which is the current foundation
for the state-sponsored exploitation of millions of migrant labourers across most of the Arabian Peninsula. This is
followed by an original contribution by Rossi, who connects
the failure of historical anti-slavery measures in Africa to
confront entrenched models of marriage, gender and kinship with more recent
patterns of wartime captivity and sexual violence. We wrap up our first week with
Farris, who reconstructs the frequently overlooked history of care and
domestic work as an integral feature of state-sponsored capitalism during the
eighteenth and nineteenth century.

Our second
week focuses upon patterns of historical and contemporary political activism
and intervention. We begin with two complimentary pieces from Jessica Pliley
and Gretchen Soderlund, who consider different aspects of the history of
anti-trafficking campaigns in the United States. As a now extensive body of
research has demonstrated, the key historical precursor to modern anti-trafficking
was not anti-slavery, but the political campaigns against ‘white slavery’ and
the patriarchal policing of prostitution. Pliley connects ‘white slavery’
interventions to concerns about national security and immigration. She
demonstrates that gendered assumptions about potential prostitutes were a
central feature of a massive government effort to regulate female mobility and sexuality.
‘White slavery’ was therefore crucial to the growth of the FBI and other
security agencies. Soderlund, in turn, focuses upon the ‘continual feedback
loop’ that binds together sensational
media reports and political activism in the 1880s to similar reports that have
been key to anti-trafficking activism from the 1990s onwards.

This second
week on political activism also features additional contributions from Andrea
Major, Nelly Schmidt, Joel Quirk and Alice Bellagamba. Major and Schmidt both focus on
the practical limitations and political complications that marked the history
of British and French anti-slavery activism. Major’s contribution demonstrates the
limitations of a celebrated boycott of ‘slave sugar’ by British abolitionists
during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, along with the practical
problems associated with ‘ethical’ sugar produced in India. Schmidt’s piece—published
simultaneously in English and French—explores the problematic attitudes and political
agendas that defined the historical worldview of nineteenth century French
abolitionists, together with recent forms of memory and forgetting. We end the
week with pieces from Quirk and Bellagamba. Quirk compares the political and ideological
appeal of ‘modern-day slavery’ to recent campaigns for reparations, while Bellagamba examines the
contemporary legacies of historical slave systems in southern Senegal. She pays particular
attention to the ways in which boundaries of community amongst slave
descendants have been constructed.

Our
final week focuses upon the contemporary legacies of historical slave systems. The
primary concern is the politics of representation, recognition and reparations.
We begin with two pieces from Ana Lucia Araujo and Ali Moussa Iye. Araujo’s contribution
asks how and why recent efforts to commemorate the past continue to intersect
with the enduring legacies of slavery in countries such as the United States
and Brazil. Another valuable perspective on this overall topic comes from Iye,
who documents the numerous ways in which the UNESCO Slave Route Project—established
in Benin in 1994—has sought to address the global history and legacies of
slavery. These authors are followed by pieces from Taiwo Adetunji
Osinubi, who explores how African writers have represented the history of
slavery and abolition, and María Elisa Velázquez, who considers the
continuing challenges that peoples of African descent face in Latin America
today. Our final piece comes from Claudine Boothe and Nathaniel Adam
Tobias Coleman, who discuss the politics and history of various calls and
campaigns to repair the wrongs of the past.

About the authors

Joel Quirk is Professor in Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. His research focuses upon slavery and abolition, human mobility and human rights, repairing historical wrongs, and the history and politics of sub-Saharan Africa. Joel is currently a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project, where he serves as Rapporteur. Your can follow him on twitter at @joelquirk.

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